Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner is the co-chair of the "Climate Mayors" of America: a group of city leaders who discourage the use of oil & gas.
Amazingly, he's also the Mayor of the energy capitol of the world: a city that gets a bulk of their funding from tax money generated through the oil & gas industry.
Now Mayor Turner is learning a hard lesson about how the economy works & why his anti-oil industry stance may come back to haunt him. Since the value of a barrel of oil has recently crashed, the city will no longer have the funding from local taxes to continue to pay many of their employees.
On the same day that the price for U.S. crude oil fell to about $30 below zero — a mind-bending concept that marked the first time oil prices had ever turned negative — Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston, the self-proclaimed energy capital of the world, stood before reporters. His words were grim and muffled by the black mask covering his face.
The mayor announced that city employees would soon be furloughed, but he declined to say how many. The Houston Zoo, he said, could expect to see funding deferred under what he called “the worst budget that the city will deal with in its history.”
Houston’s cultural institutions and nonprofit groups rely on philanthropy from the oil and gas industry. The city has had world-class opera, theater, ballet, symphony and art in large part because it had world-class oil money.
Now, all of that is under threat.
More than 240,000 Houstonians filed unemployment claims from March 15 to April 11, a number certain to rise as the backlog is processed.